


The Heathen

by perihadion



Series: Shadowboxing [2]
Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Discussion of Death, Gen, Mandalorian Culture, Religious Discussion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:21:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22248580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perihadion/pseuds/perihadion
Summary: Cara Dune returns to the tunnels under Nevarro to help with a task she knows is important to Din. Post-"Redemption".
Relationships: The Armorer (The Mandalorian TV) & Cara Dune, implied Cara Dune/Din Djarin, mentioned Cara Dune & Din Djarin
Series: Shadowboxing [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1599208
Comments: 35
Kudos: 298





	The Heathen

**Author's Note:**

> Do not comment with Omera hate.

When the dust settled on Nevarro, Cara descended into the tunnels. She wondered what she would find at the heart of them. It was only now dawning on her what an incredible act of trust it was on Din’s part to take them to the Covert. At the time her only concern had been for his safety; now that the adrenaline had cooled off she was starting to realise exactly what he had risked.

That is, if the Covert had not already been destroyed by Imps, and the survivors scattered to the stars.

If the other Mandalorians were anything like hers it was hard to believe they could have been so thoroughly crushed as the pile of armour they had found implied. But maybe they had been overwhelmed, pushed back into their labyrinth, made vulnerable by their need to protect the foundlings.

She reached the forge.

The Armorer wasn’t there. But there were a few shards on the floor of what looked like broken Imperial armour.

“They came to this place,” came the voice of the Armorer from behind her. Cara turned to look at her. She had evidently been gathering beskar salvage as she had a cart full of busted Mandalorian armour.

“You seem uninjured,” she observed.

The Armorer began to unload the beskar. “Yes.”

Cara watched as the Armorer began the task of recasting the beskar. There was something bewitching about the process and the way she handled each piece of sacred metal with care. “We were cast in the forge of stars, and return to the stars,” the Armorer stated. “I am returning the beskar to the forge.”

“I came to help,” Cara said, and the Armorer paused for just a moment to look at her. “I want to do it for —” she grasped for the words to describe him, “for my friend. The one I was here with before.”

The Armorer neither accepted nor rejected her offer of help. She just continued her work. “To people from outside our culture, this practice seems abhorrent. To destroy that which was so significant to the wearer in their life.” Cara was surprised to hear the Armorer talk so candidly about their beliefs. She knew very little about Mandalorian culture, and Din’s answers to questions had always been so sparse, she thought maybe it was not for outsiders to know. The Armorer looked directly at her and, although her face was hidden, Cara got the impression she was being sized up.

“When a Mandalorian dies,” the Armorer continued, “their soul returns to the _manda_ , the oversoul which permeates our world. Their body, too, decays, and becomes part of the planet. And the beskar —” she picked up a broken helmet and looked into its visor, before placing it into the forge. “The beskar, which was part of their physical body, is returned to the forge.” She looked at Cara. “This is the Way.”

Cara nodded. She understood: the armour which was a part of their body, which carried so much religious significance, died with them. The soul left the beskar too. Being recast, reborn, was part of its life cycle. The forge was a gateway through which the beskar passed on its journey, rather than something which unmade it.

“Please let me help,” she said.

“If you wish to help,” the Armorer responded, “collect the beskar which litters these tunnels and bring it to this place.”

Cara said nothing, but took the cart.

*

While she worked she thought about Din. The task he had been set seemed impossible — to reunite the Child with his people? Nobody they had met even knew what species it was. Who knew how long it would be an infant for? But the impossibility of the mission hadn’t seemed to bother him at all. As he had stepped up into the sky with the Child on his shoulder he had seemed almost lifted up by it. Maybe it gave some purpose to his violent life.

She looked into the visor of one of the helmets she had picked up. It was eerie, the sense that this had once contained a Mandalorian — one of the galaxy’s most feared warriors. When her Mandalorian died he would leave behind a vacant helmet, to be melted down as if he had never existed. Whatever he believed, the thought made her incredibly sad. So many people in her life had disappeared as if they never existed. It would be nice to believe there was some ‘oversoul’ for her family on Alderaan to return to, but the truth as far as Cara saw it was that artefacts like these were all that remained of a life once it had ended. She threw the helmet in the cart with the others.

*

“How does someone become a Mandalorian?” she asked the Armorer.

“One who is skilled in combat,” the Armorer responded, dropping a cuirass into the forge, “who swears the Creed, who adheres to the tenets of Mandalorian life, may become a Mandalorian.”

Cara crossed her arms. “It’s not, like, something you just are? — you know, if you’re raised by Mandalorians?”

“It is a choice,” the Armorer responded. The light from the forge made her helmet glow; she seemed almost mythic. Despite herself, Cara felt in awe of her — her conviction, her willingness to die for the sake of completing this task. “And not just one choice.” Cara watched the Armorer’s skilled hands work the forge. She wondered if those hands had ever held Din as a child, protected him, comforted him. Was there any warmth for the foundlings?

“We make a choice each day to take one more step along the Way of the Mandalore,” the Armorer continued. “Or we don’t. Din Djarin is no different from any other Mandalorian. He walks the path of his own choosing.”

Silence fell over them except for the clattering of beskar and the hum of the forge. Cara watched the Armorer work, light glinting off dull metal.

“Do you think —” she began, thinking of the piles of armour still in the tunnels, “any of them survived?”

“You have heard the stories of the Mandalorians,” the Armorer responded. “Though we have been scattered, we are not so easily exterminated.”

Cara nodded. “Will he find them?”

“Perhaps.”

She looked at the cart. It would take hours, maybe days for them to collect all the beskar. But there was something else she wanted to ask.

“Those sorcerers you mentioned,” she said. “You said they were enemies.”

“They were,” the Armorer replied.

“What will they do to him, if he finds them?” A vision of Din surrounded by enemies had haunted her since he left. Would they allow him to leave, once he had returned the Child to them? (And, something else she had wondered, would he really do it? — leave the Child to be raised by enemies, raised to hate him?)

“I have no reason to believe they would act without honour,” the Armorer responded, which Cara found unsettling rather than reassuring. She uncrossed her arms and nodded before taking the cart back out into the tunnels.

*

They worked together in silence through the night; Cara was unused to being so alone with her thoughts but there was a sort of peace in picking through the tunnels looking for these remnants of a life lived dedicated to the Way which was so important to her friend.

Occasionally the memory would rise unbidden in the dark of his hand gripping hers as he handed her the symbol of his people and asked her to let him die. In those moments she still felt the warmth of the flames around them as he bled out in her arms, beads of sweat would spring up on her skin as she worked, and when the vision receded she would be left shivering in the cold dark of the tunnels.

The Imps would have stripped and defiled his body, laughed at his unmasked face. The beskar would have been returned to the Imperial remnants and not to the forge. Her hands shook, and she pushed the thought aside. She wouldn’t interrogate how sick the thought made her; she wouldn’t interrogate the way her heart had burst in a cascade of silver sparks when she had seen him again in these tunnels.

He was safe and so was the Child. And so was she, here in the bowels of Nevarro, helping to salvage what remained of his clan so that they could be reborn in the forge’s fire and the Armorer’s skilled hands. What would he say, if he knew?

(“Thank you,” probably, if anything at all.)

*

“I have to crash,” she told the Armorer around dawn. “But I’ll be back tomorrow, when I’ve slept.”

The Armorer paused her work to nod at Cara. “It is your choice,” she responded, before resuming.

Emerging back into the surface was a disorienting experience. Nevarro’s star was just starting to kiss the edge of the horizon, bathing everything in a cool and slightly unreal light. Cara paused for a moment, looking up into the sky and finding herself wondering where Din and the Child were now. Then she squared her shoulders and started to make her way back to the rooms Greef had arranged for her.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on [twitter](http://twitter.com/theoceanblooms) or [tumblr](http://spectroscopes.tumblr.com)! If you really liked this fic, it would be lovely if you could [reblog](https://www.tumblr.com/reblog/190247041319/iCWSZQny) on tumblr.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] The Heathen](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22469464) by [hauntedjaeger (saellys)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/hauntedjaeger)




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